So strong against it, they've spent $44 million in ads to tell the public to oppose net neutrality and instead support something they're calling "digital equality", aka free Facebook (and friends) without data charges.
Source for $44 million figure: https://twitter.com/raju/status/686000321965985793
Could you provide some sources?
This Anti-competitive practice is as notorious as the ones MSFT once engaged in at their peak, for which they still get a lot of negative press, decades later.
That's not the internet I know and wouldn't serve anything but the self serving interests of these conglomerates.
"Facebook launched a print and digital media campaign [...] asking users to give a missed call, automatically sending a message to the regulator in support of Free Basics."
i.e. A lot of those who gave a missed call ended up sending a message to TRAI, likely without their knowledge.
Source : http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/start-up-...
This could change when:
- The country puts more regulations on Internet service providers like the FCC does here (maybe this is happening? maybe this isn't? I'm not familiar with India ISP regulation entities), or
- The people say "No" and choose not to use this service. But that would mean saying "No" to free Internet access. Your boss and your spouse are on Facebook, why wouldn't you want to be? Or
- The politicians say "No" to foreign capitalistic companies. We see something like this in the EU (see their privacy laws and recent government draft legislation about keeping personally identifiable data about Europeans on European servers), and we also saw something like this in China, where the government effectively gets control of who to blacklist via the firewall and censorship policies. And we all know how popular those are.
Looks like there aren't many good solutions here.
As for monopoly fears, well, remember MySpace and AOL? Internet monopolies have so far not been very durable. Technology changes rapidly and organizations frequently can't keep up (remember Bill Gates's infamous Internet letter?). I'd add that Facebook currently has ~1.5B users globally. Can they keep up structurally by adding another 1B? That's an open question.
- what is preventing the companies signed on to the Free Basics platform from being accessible in India? is it technical? political?
- what does Free Basics actually provide if not financial support to end users or carriers for now letting people access these sites?
On its face, it looks as is Free Basics is some sort of strong arm technique to get carriers to allow access to particular sites (but are those site actually blocked?) so that Facebook can reap the karma of being the one to spearhead such a change.
Sites which wants to be part of free basics will have to get facebooks approval, there by making facebook the gatekeeper.
Those sites which get approved can be accessed through free basics, and will have all the traffic go through facebook(lovely, isn't it?). Also the traffic is insecure.
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/facebooks-fb-free-basics-drive...
http://www.thestreet.com/story/13419399/1/will-facebook-fb-s...
Both articles fail to consider that the mood around Facebook in India is extremely negative, with widespread sentiment of them being a bully that doesn't mind destroying net neutrality for their own selfish goals.
So they divert their marketing budget to provide some free data to users as free basics.
It's effectively bartering marketing and data costs. Stakes for Facebook in it are high, so I wouldn't be surprised if they even paid for all of the data of the users.
http://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/internet/trai-...
OP's post is Facebook's own submission to the regulator.
The EU net neutrality legislation has specific exemptions for precisely what Facebook wants to implement in India i.e. internet.org [0]
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/27/eu-net-neu...
After all, we have the oversight of the FCC to prevent this from happening here (at least to some degree).
Facetiousness aside, I suspect the statement above answers your question. As far as the average citizen is concerned it's "not my problem" (and honestly, they probably have more immediate problems with obvious impact).
Besides, net neutrality doesn't have the same emotional imagery or appeal as sweatshop labor or species extinction, though its long-term impact (deciding who gets to see what) has severe consequences for societal health.
1. “The open architecture of the Internet creates an innovation-without-permission ecosystem. Consumers (and consumers alone) decide the winners and losers on the open Internet.”
2. The brief also describes the dangers of a “walled garden” with a “pre-selected lineup.”
3. “Such an outcome would undo much of the progress of the last two decades. Consumers would lose the ability to choose freely among competitive services and sources of information. It would also significantly decrease the rewards edge providers could realize from innovating, further decreasing consumer choice.”
4. It would also significantly decrease the rewards edge providers could realize from innovating, further decreasing consumer choice.”
Free Basics contradict all these .
The letter mentions "to discriminate both technically and financially against Internet companies and to impose new tolls on them."
No technical limitations are placed on internet companies with free basics, they just cost more to the consumer. And as the company isn't charged more to be on free basics, there isn't financial discrimination against the company.
Strictly speaking, that doesn't prohibit zero rating.
I'd be more interested to see a response to the studies that Facebook quoted. Are they taken out of context? If not, they do seem to agree that free basics would help.